56 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE WANDER.ER. Decades ofDylanology have missed the point-the music is the message. BY ALEX ROSS I F you look through what has been written about Bob Dylan in the past thirty-odd years, you notice a desire for him to die off, so that his younger self can assume its mythic place. When he had his famous motor- cycle mishap in 1966, at the age of twenty-five, it was presumed that his ca- reer had come to a sudden end: rumors had him killed or maimed, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. In 1978, after the fiasco of "Renaldo & Clara," Dylan's four-hour art :film, MarkJacob- son wrote in the Village Voice, "I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times. . . . Just the im- mutable facts." James Wolcott was un- happy to find him still kicking in 1985: "My God, he sounds as if he could go on grinding out this crap forever." When Dylan was hospitalized with a chest in- fection in 1997, newspapers ran practice obituaries: "Bob Dylan, who helped transform pop music more than thirty years ago when he electrified folk mu- sic. . ."; "Bob Dylan, whose bittersweet love songs and politically tinged folk an- thems made him an emblem of the nineteen-sixties counterculture. . ." P UYALLUP, WASHINGTON. I'm at the 1998 Puyallup Fair, in this agricul- tural suburb of Tacoma, and among the attractions are Elmer, a twenty-four- hundred-pound Red Holstein cow; a miniature haunted house ingeniously mounted on the back of a truck; bingo with Hoovers for prizes; and Bob Dylan. He is announced, wIth cheesy gusto, as "Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!" He saunters out from shadows in the back of the stage, indistinguishable at first from the four other band members. He is dressed in a gray-and-black Nash- ville getup and looks like a lopsided owl. As the show gets under way; he tries a few cautious strutring and dancing moves, Chuck Berry style. He plays five num- bers from his most recent album, "Time Out of Mind"; several hits, among them "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Masters of War"; and something more unexpected from his five-hundred-song back catalogue-"You Ain't Goin' No- h " H d . h "Ð "\.T " were. e en s WIt rorever .loung. The crowd goes wild. When I told people that I was going to follow Dylan on the road, I got vari- ous bemused reactions. Some were sur- prised to hear that he still played in pub- lic at all. It's easier, perhaps, to picture him in "Citizen Kane" -like seclusion, glowering at the Bible and listening to the collected works of Blind Willie Mc- Tell. Maybe, but he also plays more than a hundred shows a year. Last year, he appeared in Buenos Aires, Nuremberg, Brisbane, Saskatoon, and Bristol, Ten- nessee, among other places. Starting in June, he will pass through thirty Amer- ican cities, with Paul Simon in tow. As of this writing, he is in Slovenia. What are these shows like? How are they different from the classic-rock nos- talgia acts that clutter summer stages? I've been to ten Dylan concerts in the past year, including a six-day; six-show stretch that took three thousand miles off the life of a rental car. The crowds were more diverse than I'd expected: young urban record -collector types, griz- zled weirdos, well-dressed ex-hippies, and enthusiastic kids in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Deadheads are a big part of Dylan's audience, and they created odd scenes as they descended on each venue: in Reno, they streamed in psychedelic lines through the Hilton casino. I asked some of the younger fans how they had become interested in Dylan, since he is not exactly omnipresent on MTV. Most PHOTOGRAPH BY GILLES PERE55 Dylan inJanuary, 1999: Creatively tinkering with the rock era's greatest songbook. "I ';î$. 1'- . '''' .' '- ,.,;:k4J:t. f . . . >' ' . .. , - ;. ") \': "' 1..:'..:<-r.'. :' ...) :; ",' . ':'i;', '''./ :.: . '; :. . :: <(' . ': .t: ' . , .d " d .:"( .... ....... ,: "',' ,:,", 'JI;þ ,",', 0' , >'. j ic:: .(."-j .: :